Teachers should earn their high pay

Ontario teachers should earn their high pay

Legislators don’t want a government of the people, by the people and for the people but a government of the employees, by the employees and for the employees.
— Arnold Schwarzenegger, then-governor of California, The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 27, 2010

In an earlier column, I noted that Ontario elementary school public teachers earn an average $78 an hour, based on the hours their collective agreement requires them to work. That was incorrect.

By my calculations, when all is said and done, their hourly earnings are closer to $150. Extrapolate $150 into most taxpayers’ 40-hour work week and they would receive an annual salary of about $312,000, essentially what the prime minister earns and about double that of an ordinary Member of Parliament. In fact, it would make teachers, on an hourly basis, the highest paid profession in the land.

Which group of 70,000 Ontario civil servants is paid slightly more than $78 per hour?

To put it in perspective, the average Canadian aerospace engineer earns about half of this, at $40 per hour; veterinarians $38; civil engineers $37; HR specialists $28; Web designers and developers $25; and journalists, I am afraid to say, just $24, less than one-third of this group.

So which group of public employees must Ontario taxpayers be so generous toward?

Teachers’ wages are so high because their agreements require them to work so few hours each day and so few days each year and because of very generous benefits, particularly pensions.

While there are some teachers who put in more than the required hours, others do only what is required. Canadian teachers are the second-highest paid in the world, earning about double the OECD average and far more than their U.S. colleagues. This is despite dramatically shorter school days and years than most other countries, a 2011 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development indicates.

While the average Canadian earns about $45,000 a year, for some years teachers have been receiving annual increases of 3% or so, ostensibly negotiated, as well as compounded amounts as they, like many other unionized employees, hit the higher steps of their seniority grid.

This also compounds their pensions. Fully qualified teachers can retire with 70% of the average of their best five years of earnings, inflation adjusted for life, as soon as their age plus years of service total 85. This can occur as early as age 53. The average teacher retires at age 58. In some circumstances, teachers can buy years of pension service at amounts, according to the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, of approximately $1 paid for every $6 ultimately collected. Although teachers do contribute to their pension plans, a significant amount is paid by taxpayers.

Related

This pension deficit will increase along with low interest rates and longer life expectancies. Newly retiring teachers are expected to receive pensions for longer than they worked, Bill Tufts and Lee Fairbanks write in Pension Ponzi. I strongly recommend reading their analysis of this issue.

This takes us to last week’s standoff between the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario and the Ontario government. The teachers’ union called for what is clearly an illegal strike to protest Bill 115. Rather than let them do so, sue the union, fire any employed organizers and discipline every teacher who refused to work, Premier Dalton McGuinty gave the union an out, by having the Ontario Labour Relations Board make the predictable declaration of an illegal strike, knowing the union would back away. The school boards were equally callow, closing schools rather than calling in replacement teachers and disciplining any teacher who did not show up for work. This is not the way to restore stability in our schools and no way to stop the teachers’ union from continuing to play hostage with parents and students.

As a labour lawyer concerned about the state of our country’s and province’s finances, I suggest the following way government should handle this issue:

— Leave teachers’ salaries at existing levels, but require them to earn them. Increase their required hours a day to eight and their weeks worked a year to 48. That will allow reduced class sizes, fewer teachers and better education for our young people. The teachers we want to retain, those who already put in a full day’s work, should have no issue with this.

— Change the defined-benefit pension plan to defined contribution, which is virtually what all private-sector Canadians have, if they have pensions at all. That way pension earnings are based only on the amount of money in their plan. This should occur immediately as teachers’ (and public service) pensions are already unaffordable to Canadians.

— Rewrite the collective agreements to permit discharge of incompetent teachers and make their wages dependent, to a large extent, on their skills.

— Do not permit fully pensioned retirement before age 65 at least. Why should we be losing so many of our best, most skilled teachers and then permitting them to come back and work while maintaining full pensions?

— Revise labour relations acts so as to prohibit teachers from unionizing. The present model does not work to produce leaders of the future or even creative, well-rounded individuals. The unleashing of creativity and educational reform won’t begin until this occurs.

Although in my view this would survive a Charter challenge, it will not occur because the Ontario government is too beholden to the teachers, even now, and its likely successors, either in the Liberal leadership race or the opposition, don’t have the necessary toughness to see it through.

Howard Levitt is senior partner of Levitt LLP, employment and labour lawyers. He practises employment law in eight provinces and is author of “The Law of Hiring in Canada.”

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